News, Indian economy & everyday tit-bits by Ankur Aggarwal since 2005

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Daily Archives: February 19, 2019

Gone are the days, were bunch of students would gather over a tea point and discuss really radical & controversial topics. In College, we used to encourage radical speakers to debate about controversial topics and ideas. It was a symbiotic relationship, the speaker would get a chance to hone their thoughts and presentation. While we would get a daily dose of nuggets of some interesting facts, viewpoints and concepts that are otherwise very hard to get. My professors at IIT Kharagpur actually encouraged such discussions. The more diverse the view points one is exposed to, the more holistic will be the development. The more sensitive one would be to people from all walks of life and learned.
The world is getting increasingly polarized. What’s worse is that people are losing friends and making enemies over political/religious or other ideological differences. So rather than having a diversity of thoughts and ideas we have a unnatural incest of the like minded ideas resonating amongst heads who already have the same inclination.
Exposure to differing ideas gives a depth to our thought process. It forces us to re-evaluate our theories in the diverse situations and do a stress testing of our oratory/persuasion skills in front of non-receptive audience. It helps tweaking corner cases, oversight or blatant disregard to established norms which happens when the philosophies and have not been testing for implementability/practicality.
Nobody reads quality literature, leave along philosophy and theology. Even Post graduates struggle to comprehend anything longer than a 250 character quote. Most people like to skim through pictures, or a few minutes long video than indulge in an engaging mind stimulating discussions. Our tolerances to differing ideas is low at best. Most people have made twitter/whatsapp/facebook groups of like-minded people and are ferociously weeding out any divergence.
Now the most revered group of people social media are those who can post witty one line insults in the most creative manner. Those are good for entertainment purposes, but definitely don’t have any value outside that. To conclude all I am saying is that if you are looking for mind stimulating intellectual discussions, join forums which encourage that. Social media is a wrong place for those pearls of wisdom. There is no point in getting frustrated/anger because your ideas were trolled over the social media.